Good afternoon, and a big thank you to Arnoud for asking me to provide an endnote to APE's 15th anniversary conference. Predicting the future is a fraught thing to do. I was asked in 2010 to predict the future of STM publishing by 2020 at the Association of Subscription Agents annual meeting. There I applied a strategic marketing planning technique to examine the trends that would influence the future, in that case 2020. A primary conclusion was that as we were in a world of digital objects

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... are infinitely reproducible and infinitely changeable this would create all sorts of consequences for scholarly publishing. Back then I thought that copyright would no longer be simple or easy to administer. Business models based on reproduction and distribution would be increasingly under threat, and that permanence and trust in authority were challenged because of the intrinsic nature of digital objects. Now the big problem about making predictions is that when you arrive at that future it becomes clear what you overlooked. In this case, very shortly after the ASA conference, I missed foreseeing the collapse of the ASA itself! Its conference has been resurrected as Researcher2Reader but the ASA itself is no more. A caveat there for anyone trying to make predictions: you can get it wrong very easily. The strategic planning tool used in the 2010 talk (and using again today) is usually called PEST. It was invented by Francis Aguilar of the Harvard Business School, although he didn't use that exact acronym at the time [1]. *